Month: September 2015

I’m over at the North Berkeley Senior Center, where they have a nice Yamaha U-2 console piano, one of my favorite non-grand pianos. I don’t quite understand why two of the other pianists here prefer the Baldwin. To me, it plays like an old Hamilton workhorse. The keys can’t take normal rough pressure in the least; they keep breaking on me. Well, this one hasn’t yet – but I feel it’s about to. And the other pianists caution me to go easy on the keys. It’s true that the nice nuances of its action come at a much softer range; but still, where is the tone? The Yamaha, notwithstanding that for me, its action is far more subtle, precise, and superior, sounds like a damned Steinway in places. It’s just a sensational piano – like the C-3 baby grand that I played for all those years at Gulliver’s.

I played a couple of my very newer tunes, then for some reason drifted into my standard New-Age improvisations around “Feed the Birds.” After that, I more-or-less dared to play three songs from The Word from Beyond that I really have only hitherto played in my head, those being “Adytum,” “Another Round of Fear,” and“Rosy.” title: These songs reflect a spirit more consonant with the current phase in my life than the earlier music from Eden in Babylon, which was mostly written between 2010 and 2012. Although by and larger their tone is more romantic and passionate than my earlier work, the most recent song that I’ve written, “The Very Same World,”has a very upbeat, optimistic feel to it, almost bubblegum in places. As I played it, two of the guys working at the front desk tuned into it, and seemed to perk up a bit. When I was done, they both asked me: “What was that last song you played?” So I explained everything, and linked them to this web site.

It’s not that I don’t want to finish the very nearly completed script of Eden in Babylon, and finally tie it all together. It’s just that I see no reason to rush into it, even after five years, and plow away at it as though there were a deadline, thus compromising its integrity at some point. There’s a right script out there in the Universe, and it will get dropped down upon me at just the right time–just like everything else, in Art, and in life.